SNNs more closely resemble the function of biological neurons and are perfect for temporally changing inputs. I decided to teach myself rust at the same time I learned about these so I built one from scratch trying to mimic the results of this paper (or rather a follow up paper in which they change the inhibition pattern leading to behavior similar to a self organizing map; I can’t find the link to said paper right now…).
After building that net I had some ideas about how to improve symbol recognition. This lead me down a massive rabbit hole about how vision is processed in the brain and eventually spiraled out to the function and structure of the hippocampus and now back to the neocortex where I’m currently focusing now on mimicking the behavior and structure of cortical minicolumns.
The main benefit of SNNs over ANNs is also a detriment: the neurons are meant to run in parallel. This means it’s blazing fast if you have neuromorphic hardware, but it’s incredibly slow and computationally intense if you try to simulate it on a typical machine with von Neumann architecture.
I’m an engineer with a CS minor and ADHD; this kind of research is what I do with my freetime lol.
To be fair this is kind of a shared hobby project/topic between me and my friend (who is a biophysics major now in med school).
Anyway, point is that you don’t need to have a real “purpose” in order to be curious. I work in a robotics/medical lab at my university and my friends is trying to be a surgeon, yet we’re constantly in debates about astro and quantum physics to the point we’ve gotten career physicists to weigh in on our arguments.
No relevance to our majors or our work, but super fucking interesting and full of gaps where there are more theories than facts. Plenty of room for new perspectives.
AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
SNNs more closely resemble the function of biological neurons and are perfect for temporally changing inputs. I decided to teach myself rust at the same time I learned about these so I built one from scratch trying to mimic the results of this paper (or rather a follow up paper in which they change the inhibition pattern leading to behavior similar to a self organizing map; I can’t find the link to said paper right now…).
After building that net I had some ideas about how to improve symbol recognition. This lead me down a massive rabbit hole about how vision is processed in the brain and eventually spiraled out to the function and structure of the hippocampus and now back to the neocortex where I’m currently focusing now on mimicking the behavior and structure of cortical minicolumns.
The main benefit of SNNs over ANNs is also a detriment: the neurons are meant to run in parallel. This means it’s blazing fast if you have neuromorphic hardware, but it’s incredibly slow and computationally intense if you try to simulate it on a typical machine with von Neumann architecture.
chloroken@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
What’s the purpose of this research?
AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
I’m an engineer with a CS minor and ADHD; this kind of research is what I do with my freetime lol.
To be fair this is kind of a shared hobby project/topic between me and my friend (who is a biophysics major now in med school).
Anyway, point is that you don’t need to have a real “purpose” in order to be curious. I work in a robotics/medical lab at my university and my friends is trying to be a surgeon, yet we’re constantly in debates about astro and quantum physics to the point we’ve gotten career physicists to weigh in on our arguments.
No relevance to our majors or our work, but super fucking interesting and full of gaps where there are more theories than facts. Plenty of room for new perspectives.
Normalize doing research for fun!
chloroken@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Are you doing a postdoc? Masters?